Tuesday, June 28, 2011

This spring I've happened on a seasonal pairing that will be a regular part of the menu from now on: stinging nettles and morels. In particular, the combo involves Stinging Nettle Pesto with sauteed morels. You might wonder whether these two supremely earthy tastes would cancel each other out. To the contrary, they complement each other, one cool and woodsy with a sharp bite; the other rich and evocative of the ground beneath our feet.

We first tried the pairing as a crostini. Marty surprised me with it one evening while I was busy making a Pinot Noir reduction. She lightly toasted sliced baguette, spread on ricotta followed by the nettle pesto, and finished the crostini with sauteed morels. We knew she was onto something with the first bite. It sounds so simple, yes, and you can almost imagine the flavors if you've eaten these foods before. But the pairing is more than the sum of its parts.

The next try was a pizza with the pesto and morels, plus mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, and a sprinkling of garden greens. While Marty is known for making some mean pizza, this was off the hook.

Most of you will have to wait until next year to give it a shot. Stinging nettles are flowering across much of their range and morels are dust nearly everywhere except the higher elevations of the Northwest. I'm hoping I might get one more chance when I venture into the mountains in late June.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

This spring's shellfish classes have been more fun than I could have imagined. Any day playing at the shore is a day well spent, but when you add in a mix of interesting folks and the promise of fresh seafood cooked on site, the bonhomie is nearly boundless.

Those of us who have been digging clams for years sometimes forget there's a learning curve to seafood foraging—from understanding the different habitats and species to knowing what tools to use. Even the processing and cooking of shellfish can be intimidating to a first-timer.

I should know. Despite having been a regular digger of littlenecks, razors, cockles, and a variety of other bivalves, it was only in the last couple years that I started going after geoducks. Why the wait? I suppose it was a variety of things—their size, the fact that they're available only during the lowest tides of the year, the specialized cooking techniques, and so on. Geoducks are the big time.

When Jeff Ozimek at Bainbridge Island Parks & Rec (pictured below holding a 'duck and a small horse clam) proposed a geoduck class, I was admittedly skeptical. Even a seasoned geoducker doesn't always get his 'duck. Instead, we initiated the foraging curriculum with some introductory classes that tackled the basics, gathering limits of littlenecks and oysters and then cooking them up at a picnic shelter. But the interest in a geoduck class was high, so we took the plunge.

Despite a late start (the Hood Canal Bridge closed for nuclear submarine traffic) and a somewhat chaotic beginning, during which a few 'ducks escaped our furious digging efforts as an insurmountable tide flooded in, the class regrouped farther up the beach and managed to dig two geoducks. Everyone had the chance to reach deep into a hole to feel the rubbery neck of a geoduck and then contemplate what it would take to excavate around its shell and wrestle the thing out. Some of us got good and muddy, too.

The biggest letdown was tussling with a huge clam only to find out it was a horse and not a 'duck, a mistake that can usually be prevented by seeing (or feeling) the tip of the siphon before digging. (The geoduck's siphon tip is relatively smooth.) But with clam shows all around us and a posse of hungry diggers, it was catch as catch can—and no surprise we rode a few ponies.

Digging 'ducks (or any clams, for that matter) will give you an appetite. Back at the picnic shelter everyone pitched in to make sashimi and ceviche with the geoduck's raw neck meat and stir-fried body meat with snap peas, carrots, and onions. Most of the students had never tasted geoduck before. They were just as taken as I was upon first bite by its sweetness and satisfying crunch. The finish on a bite of geoduck sashimi is akin to another local delicacy, the Olympia oyster: that initial sweet clam flavor leads to a slightly coppery or metallic aftertaste that mingles nicely with a drink of white wine or a beer.

Two geoducks fed about a dozen people in all. Not a bad ratio of clam to digger.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Columbia River spring chinook and many of the Alaskan salmon stocks happen to be running when the land fish—morels—are spawning...err...sporing. No surprise that a fatty, omega 3-laden fish happens to pair very nicely with an earthy mushroom that is equally fleeting in this life.

And that pairing would be fine if we stopped right there, but a red wine reduction—in particular, a Pinot Noir reduction—is just the thing to tie these two spring delicacies together in a dance of earth and water.

I used a Copper River sockeye for this purpose along with morels foraged in Washington's central Cascades. The wine was nothing special, though one is always told to not cook with anything that you wouldn't drink, and the rule holds here.

This recipe is adapted from my friend Becky Selengut's new cookbook, Good Fish. Becky is always razzing me for using too much butter and cream (and she's right!) but I notice that she's rather liberal with the butter on this one. In fact, incredibly, I pared the butter back a skosh. The original recipe is for four servings; this is for two. You can get away with a half-stick of butter, though you may choose to add a bit more. Hey, it's your arteries.

1. To make sauce, combine sauce ingredients in large pan and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until reduced to 1/4 cup, about 30 minutes. Strain through fine wire mesh and return to pan. Whisk in butter over medium heat until sauce is syrupy.

2. Meanwhile pre-heat oven on broil. Brush salmon fillets with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place salmon skin side down on aluminum foil on baking sheet, within 6 inches or so of heating element. The rule of thumb is 10 minutes of broiling per inch of thickness; I usually cook salmon less than the rule of thumb.

Like most adages, there's some truth at the heart of the matter, though in this age of carefully farmed shellfish, not a month goes by that you can't eat a tasty oyster. When oysters put their energy and fat reserves into sexual reproduction, however, their flesh becomes thin, watery, or even milky as the the reproductive organs take center stage. The milkiness is particularly off-putting to someone looking to slurp a raw oyster.

While spawning oysters are not choice, they're not poisonous either, and sometimes in late spring you can find habitat where oysters will still be suitable for the table even as their brethren in other nearby locales are beginning to spawn. Such habitat will be at the lowest tide levels where the oysters aren't exposed to sun and tepid tide pools for lengths of time, and on beaches where colder water currents flush through the shellfish beds. Oysters in such areas have a shorter spawning window. Even so, I usually prefer to cook these oysters in the warm months.

Here's a recipe for just such an oyster: a Vietnamese-style Bánh Mì sandwich. This hybrid of traditional southeast Asian and French cuisines dates to the French occupation of Indochina. In American cities with large Vietnamese populations, the Bánh Mì is known as a delicious—and cheap!—lunch option for those on the go. Various meats are arranged on a baguette along with fixings such as fresh cilantro, pickled carrot, cucumber, daikon radish, and so on, and usually glued together with a sauce of some kind, often mayo-based. Ideally the baguette is crusty with just enough of a soft interior to cradle the meat.

I've never seen an Oyster Bánh Mì at my usual Vietnamese haunts. This is one sandwich you'll have to make yourself. Typically a Bánh Mì is scarfed down solo while hurrying to an appointment, but I've written the ingredients below to serve two at home.

Was this some sort of double-speak? Were they toying with me? More to the point, did my breath stink of contraband? "Yes, I'll carry." I casually chatted up the security personnel as the x-ray attendant scanned my bag.

"Have a good flight."

Phew! In the clear. When I got my booty safely home I already knew what the menu would be. A recipe was waiting in my in-box, compliments of my friends and ramp initiators, Russ and Carol. They like to call this dish Slippery Chicken and Ramps, which strikes me as a good name for a meal that was finessed through various checkpoints. I rounded out the menu with a simple Drunken Clams with Ramps.

5. Deglaze wok with a splash of Chinese cooking wine. Add remaining chopped ramps, which will reduce like spinach.

6. Increase heat to high and toss in chicken. Stir quickly to mix, then serve.

The name is apt. Slippery Chicken, thanks to the marinade and careful cooking, should be velvety tender. In fact, you'll most often see it called Velvet Chicken, with some recipes using egg whites to achieve this effect. I found the mixture of oil, corn starch, and soy sauce to be plenty slippery without the use of egg whites. You can spice up this dish with Sichuan peppercorns, chili paste, black vinegar, or other typical Sichuan ingredients.

By now it's late in the season even for Northern Michigan ramps. File these recipes away for next year. And speaking of next year's ramp harvest—and hopefully the harvests of many years to come—it's worth remembering that ramps are a wild resource that shouldn't be over-exploited. There's concern in some parts of the country, notably the Smoky Mountains of Southern Appalachia, that ramps are on the decline. The Mushroom Forager blog pointed out this recent article in the New York Times, "When Digging for Ramps Goes Too Far." Choose your patches wisely and exercise restraint.

Upcoming Events & Classes

Named Best Local-Foods Blog

Follow by Email

About

Author of award-winning The Mushroom Hunters and Fat of the Land, Langdon Cook is a writer, instructor, and lecturer on wild foods and the outdoors. Cook has been profiled in Bon Appetit, WSJ magazine, and Salon.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and online journals. His on-screen credits include the PBS TV series "Food Forward" and The Travel Channel's "Trip Flip."